How Benchling saved 8,000 hours by changing how it used Terraform

Benchling saved an estimated 8,000 developer hours by migrating from decentralized, laptop-based Terraform execution to HCP Terraform for centralized infrastructure management.

• •Terraform plans took up to 30 minutes per workspace across ~350 workspaces, requiring manual Slack-based coordination to avoid conflicts
• •HCP Terraform centralized plan/apply execution, state locking, and commit-level audit trails, reducing incident investigation overhead
• •Workspace strategy shifted from fewer, massive workspaces (some with 4,000+ resources) to more, smaller workspaces to reduce blast radius
• •Developer direct production access was eliminated; PRs trigger HCP Terraform runs, improving security posture as a byproduct
• •Sentinel policy-as-code was introduced in informational (soft-mandatory) mode first to build awareness before enforcing controls